We have had a weird error crop again with Office SharePoint Server. This time it is crashing daily showing a generic Runtime Error message to the client and the following message to one of our applications calling into the web service:
Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Services, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. Either a required impersonation level was not provided, or the provided impersonation level is invalid. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070542)
I am beginning to think, for once, that we jumped the gun a bit to early in the adoption cycle. While I will take part of the blame for being quick to roll out software, I think Microsoft needs to shoulder a bit of blame for this. When RTM was declared for the product, and for several months after that, the product documentation lacked content. A number of sections were marked TBD - that would mean that it's not really ready for release in my books. Support was also unable to handle the volume or types of questions being thrown at them. The product group is very inactive on the support forums. Neither the MSDN or TechNet forums are showing much, if any, activity from Microsoft personnel.
We ran into a weird ASP.NET/SharePoint problem earlier this year. Our call to PSS was nothing short of frustrating. Because of that call I have made it a standard practice to escalate out of a case to get away from anyone with a v- in their email address. Simply put, the outsourced technical support does not have access to the resources and training that the internal folks do and it is obvious. Calling today to re-open the case from earlier this year I'm informed that the SharePoint team is on a two business day callback for support. Now why would I want to put a dependency on something that I cannot get timely support for? I think there needs to be an admission of failure for the customer's sake. The product groups and management for SharePoint botched up this release. It has a lot of really neat sounding features (perhaps too much?), but it is operating a pre-mature release. Let's not even begin to talk about the lack of decent migration tools out of the box. They need to take lessons from the Windows Server or SQL Server teams who are often more than ready by the time RTM comes around.
We will continue to hobble along and survive. When the next release ships I will cast a doubt on the ability of the SharePoint team to really release a proper piece of functioning software. I wanted to share the frustration as a warning to others considering SharePoint. Take your time to evaluate it to ensure it actually works for your situation. If you have a premier support contract get the scoop on what the real status of SharePoint support is. And finally get a good file search utility and Reflector to dig into their code to find out what it is doing.